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Berlin Documentary Forum 2

neja — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 17:02:57 +0000

The BERLIN DOCUMENTARY FORUM is a biannual interdisciplinary festival showcasing visual, audiovisual and performative works from all over the world.

New documentary practices are cross-disciplinary, dialectical and above all performative, regarding documentary as the staging of particular relationships between documents, authors and spectators. The second Berlin Documentary Forum sets out to present these new understandings of documentary in a program specially devised by international artists, filmmakers, cultural historians and theoretists. A group exhibition of contemporary art entitled “A Blind Spot” and the launch of an online project, “issue zero”, complement the four days of events at Haus der Kulturen der Welt.

Harun Farocki (CZ)

neja — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 10:50:56 +0000

Harun Farocki in conversation with Neja Tomšič. The interview was recorded at Berlin Documentary Forum 2.

Joachim Koester (DK)

neja — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 13:37:20 +0000

In the interview, Koester speaks about his work From the Secret Garden of Sleep (2008), a series of black and white images of cannabis plants, magazines and texts, which unfolds a story of the plant and its political connotations. He speaks about this creative process and the relation between reality, fiction, the visible and the invisible.

What is interesting in this project is the hidden index of photography, what surrounds an image (..) What my photographs are really about is the secret index of things, or better: the invisible index of things, how things connect in ways that are not quite apparent. Engraved in this plants are all these stories: of the sixties, of Ronald Reagan, of amateur photography, of the botanist who would manipulate the plant, so the very appearance which I describe as somehow alien - is filled with discourses and politics.

To hear more about Joachim Koester’s work, especially his work “Calcutta Served as a Basis for British Expansion in the East” (2005—07), see the presentation Opium, Indigo, Photography by Christopher Pinney at Issue Zero.